The Brain and the Law

Much has been written about how law as an institution has developed
to solve many problems that human societies face. Inherent in all of
these explanations are models of how humans make decisions. This
article discusses what current neuroscience research tells us about the
mechanisms of human decision-making of particular relevance to law.
This research indicates that humans are both more capable of solving
many problems than standard economic models predict, but also limited
in ways those models ignore. This article discusses how law is both
shaped by our cognitive processes and also shapes them. The article
considers some of the implications of this research for improving our
understanding of how our current legal regimes operate and how the law
can be structured to take advantage of our neural mechanisms to improve
social welfare.